Background
Józef Beck was born on October 4, 1894 in Warsaw, Poland.
Józef Beck was born on October 4, 1894 in Warsaw, Poland.
When World War I started, Beck was a student at a college of Engineering.
During World War I Beck fought in the Polish Legion. After the May 1926 military coup d’état led by Piłsudski, Beck became head of his cabinet and served as foreign minister of Poland. While maintaining a nonthreatening attitude toward the Soviet Union and Germany, he attempted to improve the international position of Poland by strengthening its alliances. As a result of the Munich Agreement, Poland was awarded the Cieszyn (Teschen) area of Czechoslavakia in October 1938. On April 6, 1939, Beck signed the alliance with Great Britain that was to bring Britain into World War II after the Germans invaded Poland in September of that same year. Along with the other members of the Polish government, he arrived in Romania in September 1939 and was interned; he died there at age 50. His memoirs were first published in French as Dernier rapport.
Beck was hostile to the League of Nations and did not think it could help Poland. France wanted some arrangement with Poland but distrusted Beck. So Beck looked in new directions. He explored the possibility of realizing Piłsudski's concept of Międzymorze ("Between-seas"): a federation of central and eastern European countries stretching from the Baltic to the Black Seas and — indeed in later variants from the Arctic Ocean to the Mediterranean. Such a coalition existing between Germany in the west and the Soviet Union in the east, might have been strong enough to deter both from military intervention. Beck realized that for the immediate future there was no realistic chance of building such a force. Therefore, he was prepared to settle in 1937–38 for a diplomatic bloc referred to as a "Third Europe," led by Poland, that might become the nucleus of a Międzymorze federation. Beck's "Third Europe" diplomatic concept comprised a bloc of Poland, Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Romania. His efforts failed for several reasons:
Both Italy and Hungary preferred to align themselves with Germany rather than Poland;
The dispute between Romania and Hungary over Transylvania doomed efforts to include them in a common bloc.
The desire of both Italy and Hungary to partition Yugoslavia between the two blocked any effort to include Rome, Budapest and Belgrade in an alliance.
None of the other four states meant to form the "Third Europe" with Poland was interested in accepting Polish leadership.